


the wood wakes, and you are here for proof

by rosedamask



Category: Twin Peaks
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Black Lodge, F/M, First Kiss, Forests, Recovery
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-14
Updated: 2019-02-14
Packaged: 2019-10-28 02:55:22
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 940
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17779241
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rosedamask/pseuds/rosedamask
Summary: Down at the Savings and Loan, Audrey had wished for water, and for the woods, and for Agent Cooper. The water came first.





	the wood wakes, and you are here for proof

**Author's Note:**

  * For [villaindecay](https://archiveofourown.org/users/villaindecay/gifts).



> Title from Robert Frost's "A Dream Pang." Cooper is reading from Anthony Summer's _Goddess: The Secret Lives of Marilyn Monroe_.

Down at the Savings and Loan, Audrey had wished for water, and for the woods, and for Agent Cooper. 

The water came first.

  


\--

  


There must have been a fire here earlier, but it was over now: all that was left was some pitchy smoke at the tips of the pines, this feeling like the night breathed red.

Audrey stood between the sycamores with a worn shellacked playing card in her hand. There was a curtain swaying in front of her, hot and swoony in the breeze, the same kind they hung up across the border: as if someone wanted to say, _this is a place where men go_. She stroked at it with the corner of her card and left a snick in the velvet, just so it knew she was there.

It opened for her, jewel-box slow. On the other side, there was Agent Cooper, dark and hurt like a burn in celluloid. He held a Queen of Diamonds up to her.

“Audrey,” he said, “did you push this under the curtain?”

“Not exactly,” she said, turned up her card to him. “But look. Spades find diamonds, don’t they?”

She had their king warm in her hand.

“Audrey,” and he came in closer, into the trees, “we need to leave the woods as a matter of urgency, and you need to come back with me. It’s not safe here.”

Somewhere in the curtains, she could hear a saxophone, swollen and lonesome, catching on the air like that was how you got sap from velvet. It made it sound like they could have stayed there forever, if the wind hadn’t taken her.

  


\--

  


She opened her eyes, and Agent Cooper was there beside her, reading from a paperback with Marilyn Monroe on the cover. They’d printed it like she was on some dark honeymoon somewhere, laid out all hazy and golden under long bedroom shadows. “Marilyn’s comings and goings at the Lodge,” she heard him say, “were to loom large in the mysteries surrounding the end of her life.”

He was pale and neat in his suit, and it made Audrey ache back into her body just to look at him. 

“Special Agent,” she said, that funny way that sleeping made you sound sometimes, like there was something sour and lush inside of you that made you the same as jasmine, or jazz, or stale white smoke.

“Audrey,” he said, and she wanted to press it to her cheek, the soft, clean way he talked. “Audrey, don’t try to move, you’ve been out for almost three weeks.” 

“Oh.” She closed her eyes. “Was it the kind of lodge where they have music?”

“Sinatra was the majority stakeholder. I can’t think of any lodge with an accredited license that could beat it for that. Dr. Hayward left me every women’s magazine in the tri-county, but there were a few things here I wanted your opinion on.”

“I dreamed about diamonds,” she said. “But they weren’t her kind, not really. They were red, like on a playing card. You think that means anything?”

He took hold of her hand over the side of the bed. “Audrey, it means everything.”

  


\--

  


He took her out to the forest, when he thought she’d make it if he kept his arm under hers. 

“You ever think about how Little Red Riding Hood must have had to walk back home through the woods, right after she got cut out the wolf?” she’d asked in the car. His tie today cut to red every third stripe: she saw it reflected in the window, traced out the distance up to the apple of his throat with her fingers on the glass while they waited for the lights to change.

“It never struck me as a boy,” he admitted, “but I have been thinking a great deal, lately, about how a forest makes a home.”

It was dim and quiet out there, like hiding out in the storeroom at Horne’s. Pine needles brushed up against them as they walked, and that was as dreamy as being touched by the scratches in an emerald.

“I brought something,” she said, reached into her skirt pocket and came back with a cassette box where nightclub singer slumped against a hot orange-red background like her band only played at dawn. “I thought – maybe this could help you, if you put it in your tape recorder sometimes. In places like this.”

They left it to play under a hemlock, breathy strings just high enough for them to hear.

“You ever played your records here before, Audrey?” he asked.

Going this deep into the woods had made his eyes turn soft and dark, like the trees really were the kind of green that could put you to sleep. She tingled down to her fingertips. 

“Sometimes. It’s so different, when you dance out here.” She tilted her face up to the sky and swayed a little, sore under her sweater. “Like if there’s music here anyway, it matters what kind you bring.”

Her eyes had drifted shut; she only knew he was coming from the snap of the branches under his shoes and then his arms were around her. “I couldn’t, in good conscience, let you dance alone,” he said, gently.

Under his jaw, he smelled a little sleeker than the woods, but just as green. “If you’re going to let yourself get this close and still be good to me,” she said, all heavy and soft in her throat, “does that mean you can kiss me now?”

His mouth was warm and careful over hers. Down in the moss, her tape played on in its slow circles.


End file.
